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Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Occupying the Occupy Movement: Robin Morgan (Hurrah!)

Occupying the Occupy Movement

An Occupy movement for
2012 could gain strength and staying-power with strategies suggested by
an emerging feminist critique.

Mexico city collective,
from Occuprint.org

As women of the Arab Spring
are rediscovering, being participants, even leaders, of the uprisings
hasn’t led to women’s equality—a depressingly familiar scenario,
notoriously reminiscent of the 1960s aftermath of the Algerian
revolution. In fact, the phenomenon is historically omnipresent
(including the American revolution).

Here in the Global North, for
example, women were active early in the Occupy movement. Yet that
movement has presented an optic of being predominantly male (and in the
United States, white and young)—as well as indifferent to the fact
that capitalism simply cannot be transformed without confronting its
foundation: patriarchy, itself reliant on controlling and
exploiting women. And women, by the way, comprise 51 percent of the
99 percent (and virtually zero of the 1 percent).

Who then is the real
constituency in need of economic justice?

The United Nations
acknowledges that the world’s poor are 70 percent female. Women’s
unpaid labor is worth $11 trillion globally, accounting for 41 percent
of the GDP in, for instance, North America. It could well be argued
that, given women’s massive amount of unpaid labor—and since women are
the means of reproduction who produce the labor force
itself—most women exist more under feudalism than under capitalism.

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Equal
pay, reproductive rights, maternity leave, childcare—all are economic
as well as human-rights issues. So are sweatshop labor/maquilliadores,
sex trafficking/slavery/tourism, and war’s impact on women, who with
their children comprise some 80 percent of refugees and displaced peoples.
Women are the primary caregivers for the ill, the young, the aged, and
the dying—so health costs are “women’s issues.”

The pornography and
prostitution industries each run into the hundreds of billions of
dollars annually; China spends $27 billion just on Internet pornography. We
only have statistics for a few “developed” countries on the staggering
cost of domestic violence. We do know that domestic violence costs $5.8 billion a year in the
United States alone.

One would think that such
“women’s issues” would make unarguable the centrality to economics of
female human beings. Wrong. Too often, the Occupy movement has betrayed
its own vision by revealing itself as a sexist microcosm of the society
it opposes. Harassment and assaults required women to define safe
sleeping areas—immediate necessities yet questionable strategically,
since these can become “ghettos,” while the problem, a male sense of
entitlement, goes unchallenged.

Nor does this happen only in
the United States, although North American sites got more press
attention. Incidents of sexual assault and rape have been reported not
only in New York, Cleveland, Dallas, and Baltimore, but in Glasgow,
Montreal, London, and more. In some locations, male site monitors were
reluctant to call police for fear that negative attention would be
deleterious to the Occupy “message.”

Brooklyn, Occupy Imnop,
from Occuprint.org

Now, however, women are
protesting that kind of protest. In Bristol, England, feminists
called for “Carrying Our Safe Space With Us,” aiming to empower women
to speak at Occupy general assemblies. On November 25, International Day
for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Feminists Occupy London
took to the streets denouncing rape; that same day, Italian women marched in Rome,
defining economic austerity measures as a form of violence against
women, and citing policies that in effect force women to work multiple
jobs, paid and unpaid. In Manila, Occupy was taken over by women,
becoming Occupy RH (reproductive health),
Filipina-led. Women in Slovenia, New Zealand, and Australia publicly
decried the lack of safety for women at Occupy sites.

Having caught the world’s
imagination with an admirable energy, seemingly spontaneous and
seemingly grassroots, the Occupy movement is now poised at a
crossroads. It has enormous potential—but lasting change will
require consciousness that doesn’t ignore the majority of humanity. It
needs to break free of being “a guy thing” or risk drowning in its own
rhetorical generalities.

It’s not as if certain models
aren’t there. The women of England’s Greenham Common “occupied” turf decades before
OWS—they endured, and won. Irish women barred doors to
keep men from storming out of Northern Ireland peace talks. Women in Liberia sat
singing for months in a soccer field to birth a revolution. Market women
in Ghana brought down a government. Gandhi acknowledged copying the
concept of Satyagraha— nonviolent resistance—from
India’s 19th century women’s suffrage movement.

These are different—and
long-lasting—techniques of protest, by which at first it seemed the
Occupy movement was influenced. (At the risk of offending anarchists,
I’ll paraphrase two of the Women’s Media Center slogans: “You have to
name it to change it,” and “You have to see it to be it.” As a woman who
once agreed “Level everything, then we’ll talk politics,” I
recommend examples and clearly articulated demands as pretty good
stuff.)

Christy C Road,
Brooklyn, from Occuprint.org

It’s not too late. As the
Occupy movement in many areas moves away from the tactic of claiming
physical space, a change of protest style is in order: more hit-and-run,
engage-disengage, morning-long, afternoon-long, or day-long (not
open-ended) demonstrations—plus focused, doable demands.

Most women have far too many
other responsibilities—including children—to spend months in tents
playing drums, even if the tents were safe spaces. The Occupy
movement needs women—the numbers, the economic analysis, the different
strategic approach—to survive, let alone succeed. Yet women’s engagement
with it might well require turning up in numbers massive enough to
effect a de facto transformation of leadership and focus;:occupying
Occupy in a “women’s style” could make all the difference.

At the minimum, it should be
possible to demand that men become the change they claim they want to
see. (I mean,really, guys.) If Occupy men can dare be
unafraid of that different kind of leadership—can even seek it out and
welcome it—everyone wins and the paradigm is transformed.

If not, they will at least
have radicalized a whole new generation of feminists.

The views expressed in
this commentary are those of the author alone and do not represent WMC.
WMC is a 501(c)(3) organization and does not endorse candidates.

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